on customer-facing production systems, and the janitor will not be allowed to unplug the tape backup rack to plug in the floor buffer.

Science hasn't made any progress on the nature of sentience since Descartes went all tinfoil hat on reality before walking himself back.

You can tell because they can't really create something we would recognize as true sentience. Maybe it's an impossible ask, maybe it's one product release away.

But the best scientific reasoning has come up with to date is a way to sample from a probability distribution that approximates human output. And a lot of philosophical woo to assert without proof that that same process accurately describes what's going on between your ears.

Yeah, it's gonna be literally impossible to see you walking around in that thing emitting visible light in all directions.

Yes, thank you, young man. Here's a shilling,* keep the change.

*A shilling being a transcendental fraction of the King's pound sterling, of course. Cuz if you're going to have a king and put his face on your money, any rationality in your currency is out the window already.

What about prefaulted pages?

want to have a deep philosophical discussion with my microwave over the meaning of sentience.

By dropping bombs on the enemy's strategic assets that enable him to make war.

Bridges, railways, factories, communication nodes.

Grandma and grandpa used to tell me stories about how when the Germans invaded and started bombing Kiev, they were sent east of the Ural mountains, along with all the factory machinery that could be put on railcars, so that the munitions plants could keep running (staffed by kids too young to fight and oldtimers too old to fight) to keep the front lines supplied.

How do they identify a robot? Flash up a naked circuit board for the captcha and see if there's a complaint about pr0n on the bank login!

All centralized power will work to expand its reach. Sometimes nakedly as in Germany or the Soviet Union (neither place having developed a generations-long tradition of self-rule that makes such things taboo). Sometimes subtly, through agencies' expanded remits or assertions of authority to fill a vacuum. But nearly always in the name of some common good. Populism is a dirty word among some folks, you equate it with reactionary politics, but what word would you use to describe exercising "the people's power" on their behalf?

Republicans used to be protectionists until the middle of 20th century. Milton Friedman convinced a lot of people there were no downsides to outsourcing so long as the quarterly numbers were good. Dude even had the chutzpah to say it's okay to let the defense industry wither away because "steel can be stockpiled."

He was certainly influential. But now that I'm older and wiser, he's the poster child for why economists should be treated with all the respect that practioners of voodoo are due.

And the defined benefits get paid for with...

Well, in the automotive industry, which never fully off-shored, there are plenty of domestic suppliers in places like Alabama and Tennessee, where the factories have always been.

There were plenty of domestic electronics suppliers back in the 70s and 80s when Macs and IBM PCs and peripherals were mostly assembled domestically too. The final assembly went chasing slave labor overseas and surprise surprise the supply chain here withered away (or off-shored, too).

In aerospace where off-shoring is flat-out illegal in most cases (ITAR), the domestic supply network for both mechanical and electronics is quite robust.

Oh and I forgot to mention, places like Brazil have domestic production quotas for electronics too. Maybe they were helped along by the fact that until recently we had no such trade barriers in place. Or as a certain favorite politician opined, they were taking advantage of our trade policies to benefit their workforce.

Totally unique to the business schools. Absolutely none of that behavior among English majors or engineering undergrads. Anywhere. Ever. Born 40, all of them.

One of several that have developed in our system.

Greed is human nature. Profit-driven business decisions at their best harness this aspect of human nature to productive means, such as as making and selling widgets for the glory of your wallet; as opposed to destructive means such as warmaking for the glory of the state.

Profit as a destructive force in society is very much in the eye of the beholder. One man's ruthless cost-cutting to make the shareholders happy is another man seeing good returns in his retirement fund or his kids' college fund. To take one example.

Yeah. I have this great idea for predicting the future. It just needs some startup funding to get off the ground...